My personal 2018 Lisk recap

As most of you know by now, my name is Meyade Curfs, also known as Elum. The recap is my personal story and my personal opinion on certain things. I am not a forging delegate, nor do I get paid by Lightcurve for the work that I’m doing. This has all been done voluntarily because I believe in the Blockchain and I think that Lisk can make the Blockchain accessible to everyone.

I wrote this recap because I think it’s important that people outside my community know what I’m doing here in the Netherlands. In this recap I have only indicated the highlights.

Enjoy!

January: Oh the days… It didn’t matter where I went, whether it was at a cafe or a sports game, everyone was talking about cryptocurrencies and how much money they had made. The funny thing is, those same people couldn’t tell me what they actually invested in. What is crypto, what is Blockchain? — They didn’t know. That was the moment where I realized: I have to educate these people. That’s why I set up Bitcurfs — a Dutch education platform about the entire Crypto / Blockchain market.

I manage a Blockchain group on WhatsApp of 70 people that I know personally. I founded this group back in March 2017 and since then I have been educating them by using the Bitcurfs Academy (it is currently only available for internal use and not for the rest of the world). We have been spreading the word about Lisk since then.

I started the Bitcurfs Academy in June 2017. This is a little sneakpeak of the Glossary, containing more than 300 words.

So, what do you do if you have 70 people around you that are all very interested in Blockchain and Lisk? Exactly, you host a meetup! That’s where it all started, the 2018 Lisk journey in the Netherlands…

The tickets for the Lisk relaunch event were out on the 10th of January. This was the best chance for the group to get together and finally see what Lisk has been doing, in real life. So, together with Joo5ty we decided to pay for everyone’s plane ticket (it was around €70-, and the price of Lisk was around €30, the good old days). This was of course very appreciated by the group, and we all looked forward to going to Berlin together…

February: So, after the dip we had in the BTC price, we started to go up and go back to 10.000$ BTC, and on the other side we had Lisk going up because of the relaunch event that was coming. Everyone felt like a Wall Street trader because of the trade that they made back in 2017.

20th of February, the day of the relaunch event. I woke up early because our flight was about to leave at 09:00 and I was the guide of the group, after all, I organized this trip. So, it was 06h45 and I saw that the flight had a 1 hour delay. All good, I went to the airport by car, together with a good friend of mine. When I finally arrived at the airport, I double checked my pockets to get my passport. And yep, you guessed it, I forgot it at home. I knew the plane had a one hour delay, so we went back to my house to get it. When we finally arrived at my house, the group told me (they were already at the airport) that the flight would leave in time. Oh oh.. We rushed back to the airport but unfortunately we missed our flight. It was 09h00 and we had to be in Berlin at 17h00. We had no other choice than to take the car.

Luckily, we made it in time. There we were, with all of the group, together at the relaunch event. I still get goosebumps when I think about the logo reveal, it was amazing. This has been an experience that we are still talking about today.

March: I’ve had three meetups in March where I spoke about Lisk. It was much easier to talk about Lisk since we now had the Lisk Academy. The overal sentiment at the meetups? People were starting to see that Lisk is not just a project for the short term. It is a platform that is here to stay. Like I always say, it’s going to be the Wordpress of the Blockchain world — access the power of Blockchain. It was an amazing experience talking about this revolutionary technology at meetups, since I never expected that I was going to do this in my life.

April: It wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Lots of people in my community were waiting for Core 1.0 and were following the roadmap, and we all know how that went. It was a hard time defending Lisk, also with the price going down. However, I knew that everyone could make mistakes and it’s a matter of seeing the big picture in times like that.

June: This was the first time that I actually set up an event for Lisk: the Lisk Amsterdam Meetup on the 26th of June. I worked closely with Jan on this event (former Community Manager) and we always kept contact since. It was amazing to once again bring the Dutch community together.

Thomas and I went to the IoT Blockchain Europe Expo the day after. There was a girl who recognized the Lisk sticker on my laptop and said “Lisk!!” and shook my hand, not knowing that the Head of Marketing of Lisk was sitting in front of me. It was pretty funny to see the reaction of Thomas..

IoT Blockchain Europe Expo, day two.

Afterwards we did some sightseeing with the rest of the HQ team, a good day.

The summer days in Amsterdam!

July: Unfortunately Jan left LiskHQ in July. I learned a lot from him and we have stayed friends ever since.

This was also the month where Mat and I were talking about the Ambassador program. He wanted to appoint me to become the Dutch Ambassador. I was really glad to hear this, after almost a year, I would finally get an official title within Lisk.

July was also the month that Thomas joined my WhatsApp group. The group was happy that they could now speak informally with Thomas. This way they could also see that he is also a human of flesh and blood. You might be thinking, what’s the big deal? Well, this community has been promoting Lisk for almost a year and it was a bit of recognition for them that the Head of Marketing joined the group. And yes, we could now all cry together about the losses we had made.

August: The month started bad with some miscommunication in a blogpost. Core 1.0 was suppose to go from Alpha>Mainnet, but that was later changed from Alpha>Beta. People were a bit upset because of this miscommunication. They understand, everyone makes mistakes and sometimes things take longer in life that you expected, but, always communicate with the community in a honest way. Max eventually clarified this miscommunication in a post on Reddit.

September: This is the month where I officially had been appointed as Dutch Ambassador. Now I finally had some recognition when I went to companies or schools to promote Lisk.

Lisk London Meetup: This was the first time that I visited London, it is beautiful. I met up with John_Muck in the afternoon and we directly went to Chelsea to have Lunch with LiskHQ and the GNY team. It was a great lunch (thank you Richard) and there was a great vibe.

In the evening we had the Lisk London Meetup. Unfortunately, not a lot of people showed up, but that shouldn’t be a reason to kill the vibe. We had a great evening and we ate some burgers at Five Guys afterwords with the HQ team and John_Muck.

October: Oh yes, another Lisk Meetup in Berlin! Before the meetup I got a tour of Lightcurve office and met everyone (like really, everyone). A full recap of the Berlin Meetup can be found here: https://medium.com/@LiskHighlights/lisk-berlin-meetup-4th-october-2018-69b3cab6ce8f. As always, Thomas, me and two people of the Dutch Community went to do some sightseeing in Berlin and ate at a restaurant together. These moments are gold.

Back in Holland; I had a meeting on the 8th of October at BNR Newsradio (Dutch Radio Station) to talk about Lisk. They were really impressed and were really looking forward to do a interview about this. I told them that it would be better to do the interview in 2019 because we would have more clarity about which sectors Lisk wants to focus on.

This was also the month where I started organizing a Blockchain event, together with the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. I knew that, if Lisk wants to become the standard for dApps in the Netherlands, that I needed to visit parties in the Netherlands to promote Lisk. So, that was my task for October; visit companies/schools etc. in the Netherlands that are interested in the Blockchain or that are already working with the Blockchain. I managed to visit 8 companies and 5 schools, including the company called Triple which happens to be the company where the whole Dutch Pool works (I didn’t know this beforehand).

Back to the Erasmus event. We now had a really good lineup including IBM, ING and Lisk. This is exactly the professional recognition that I wanted Lisk to have in the Netherlands, and I was really glad that I made this happen.

November: Fast forward to the end of November, the 26th of November to be exact. I met Thomas, Julian and Joo5ty in Utrecht at the Lisk Center. We had some good lunch and then drove to the Erasmus Meetup. Did you know, Thomas doesn’t like rap… He only listens to reggaeton and techno. I personally like listening to rap in the car, but I also like techno, so I put on some techno. Oh wait, Julian is also in the car, but he doesn’t like techno… So I put on a podcast, lol.

The Erasmus Event: Unfortunately, IBM canceled last minute, but they were replaced by the Dutch Blockchain Coalition. Most of the people that came to the event were students, ready with their laptop to make notes. So, first speaker, Ad Kroft of the Dutch Blockchain Coalition. He was telling about the Blockchain basics and its impact. He explained things too difficult, the students didn’t understand anything and were bored (he should’ve used the Lisk Academy).

Next speaker: Lisa Biesenbach of ING. She was a student of the Erasmus University, just like Thomas. I know what the audience was thinking; Blockchain and banks, aren’t they rivals? She explained how ING would like to use the Blockchain, just like how Andreas Antanopolous explained how banks want to use the Blockchain; they want to remove the decentralized, free and honest part and just keep the tiny piece that suits them well aka running all the nodes on ING computers.

After these two speakers we had a 30 minute break, and yes, you guessed it; after the break, half of the people left, such a shame.

Finally, Thomas went on stage. He knew what he had to say to wake the audience; “Who is still holding strong in this bear market?. He knew that most of the audience were crypto holders. He started off by showing the ELI5 Lisk Academy video with Jacob. He received a standing ovation after showing the video; that’s how you explain Blockchain! Fun fact: 90% of the audience were Lisk holders. The Lisk presentation was a big success and we received many compliments afterwards (and yes, ING liked it too).

After all the presentations, we had a really interesting Q&A. A lot of questions were for the ING, as you can see on the image.

The Amsterdam Meetup: I picked up Thomas and Julian at their hotel in the morning and we drove to Amsterdam (this time with techno on). We had a couple of meetings before the meetup, including with BNR. After the meeting we went to a Burger place nearby to gather up with the team and finalize things for the event.

Burgers with the team!

The meetup was great and it was really nice to finally announce the Lisk Center. The Dutch community is really happy with it and they cannot wait to see it.

December: You cannot imagine how much time and energy I have put in the last two years to finally stand where I stand today. I had one more big thing on the calendar: my Lisk Meetup in the Hague, my hometown. Finally I could bring my community together and show them what we’ve done in the last two years, and what we are planning on doing in the next two years.

The Lisk the Hague meetup: People tend to forget where we’ve came from in times like these. That’s why I wanted to recap the last two years with the community, and look forward to the next two years. I started with comparing a lot of things: the Lisk website in 2016 vs 2018, the Lisk Nano vs Lisk Hub, the Lisk team in 2016 vs 2018 etc. etc. People really liked this and realized that Lisk has been doing a lot in the last two years.

2016 Lisk website vs 2018 Lisk website

To look forward, I presented the roadmap. What can we expect in the next two years, and what does for example ‘Alpha SDK’ mean. I also tackled some classic questions like: “Why does the roadmap have no dates” and “Is Lisk going to do something about the Consensus Algorithm?” These are questions that have been asked a lot and there is a lot of ignorance in the community, so this was the perfect opportunity to answer these questions.

Lisk Roadmap

I also asked Joo5ty and Jurre to go on stage with me to talk about the Lisk Center. Finally, a place from the community, for the community. A huge shoutout to the delegates that made this happen and a shoutout to Joo5ty for putting in so much work in this. We will present much more information about the Lisk Center in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned!

Sneakpeak of the Lisk Center

Final words: Thank you for reading my recap of 2018, it has been an incredible year. I would also like to thank everyone who has supported me in the past two years, I will not forget you!

I can’t wait to push this even further in 2019, making it a even more successful year.